I Context

We have to realise that humans cannot solve everything alone. Other animals are collaborating to save the world, like bees. If we start noticing that, perhaps we can learn to cooperate more.

Lydia Baan Hofman

Imagine twenty-five people in an online meeting, twenty-five little two-dimensional squares on the screen of a laptop representing human beings in dialogue on Gaia economies. Everything is angular, lifeless and out of context. The most vivid images I can discern from the different backgrounds of the workshop participants are a drawing of an octopus, a half-withered plant and a fragment of a garden mirrored in a window which reflects the sun. It is in this setting that we explore what a Gaia economy could look like.

Reon Brand’s nature-based concept of being, called Gaia, compels us to look at our place in the ecosystem not as humans versus the environment, but as active agents that are part of a larger ecosystem. Gaia emphasises the natural dynamic balance and connected interplay between all living beings and the geological ecosystem. Latour advocates for a similar route underpinning the need for interspecies interaction more urgently: we have to figure out how to exist with Gaia, as a war against her is impossible to win.

Either we come out on top of Gaia, and we disappear with her; or we lose against Gaia, and she manages to shudder us out of existence.’ In other words, whether we should defeat or be defeated by earth, we lose.

(Line Marie Thorsten, quoting Latour, 2017)

(Earthly Beings)

Twenty-five people from different disciplines, backgrounds, regions and sectors, yet all look the same in our little virtual boxes. We draw, write and play music and videos on an endless white canvas. The endlessness of the screen is in stark contrast with the imprisonment of our invisible bodies. In this disembodied state of being, we sketch the contours of an embodied economy. In this alienated environment, we outline the playing field of an economy that thrives on relatedness.

Allowing an economy to emerge from or with Gaia in itself is not an easy task. The virtual context we find ourselves in emphasises that even more.

It is about human beings being transformed by the world in which we find ourselves—or, to put this in more reciprocal terms, it is about the earth’s future being transformed through a living process of interbeing.

(Gibson-Graham and Roelvink 2010)

We ask ourselves, what does it mean to be an earthly being? (Bruno Latour, 2018) How to cooperate with all other earthly beings on an equal basis? How to express all our beautiful needs, ways of exchange and reciprocity, and how to take care of each other? Can we communicate with rivers, forests, rocks, trees, animals or viruses? How can we stop othering each other and move towards more inclusive ways of being and becoming? How to build meaningful relationships with all or even one non-human earthly being? How to listen and converse with each other?

Silence and slowness are openings for the body to shift its stance, to meld a little more with its surroundings. We need to learn, not in the sense of increasing a store

“We cannot ignore what is around us now. Changes we make, have limited effect. But you see examples like Greta Thunberg, and children in Ecuador who took government to court. It starts with people making a new mindset. That may build momentum and create real change. We should be free from the paradigm of now.”

(Biography)

Lisanne Buik is a multidisciplinary artist and futures designer operating at the intersection of ecology, technology, spirituality and somatics. In her speculative installations, films and publications she combines emerging science with ancient wisdom to explore the shift from the age of the machine into a new age of symbiosis between nature, non-human species, humans, and technology.